Loren Eiseley (September 3, 1907 - July 9, 1977) was an American
anthropologist, educator, philosopher, and natural science writer, who
taught and published books from the 1950s through the 1970s. He received
many honorary degrees and was a fellow of multiple professional
societies. At his death, he was Benjamin Franklin Professor of
Anthropology and History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. (Click
here for full Wikipedia article)

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As for men, those myriad little detached ponds with their own swarming
corpuscular life, what were they but a way that water has of going about
beyond the reach of rivers?

Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man.

Each one of us is a statistical impossibility around which hover a
million other lives that were never destined to be born.

Every man contains within himself a ghost continent.

Evolution has to be lived forward.

If it should turn out that we have mishandled our own lives as several
civilizations before us have done, it seems a pity that we should
involve the violet and the tree frog in our departure.

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.

In the desert, an old monk had once advised a traveler, the voices of
God and the Devil are scarcely distinguishable.

It has been asserted that we are destined to know the dark beyond the
stars before we comprehend the nature of our own journey.

It has been said repeatedly that one can never, try as he will, get
around to the front of the universe. Man is destined to see only its far
side, to realize nature only in retreat.

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great
scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.

Life may exist in yonder dark, but it will not wear the shape of man.

Like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among
us.

Man is always marveling at what he has blown apart, never at what the
universe has put together, and this is his limitation.

Many of us who walk to and fro upon our usual tasks are prisoners
drawing mental maps of escape.

Modern man lives increasingly in the future and neglects the present.

One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye
other than human.

Seek out the sunshine. It is a simple prescription. Avoid the darkness.

The future is neither ahead nor behind, on one side or another. Nor is
it dark or light. It is contained within ourselves; its evil and good
are perpetually within us.

The journey is difficult, immense. We will travel as far as we can, but
we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or to learn
all that we hunger to know.

The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a
more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the
tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind
allegiance to the past fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a
habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep.

The plan is not what you think.

We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its
perfect image, for it has no perfect image except Life, and life is
multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time.

We cannot pluck a flower witout disturbing a star.

We think we learn from teachers, and we sometimes do. But the teachers
are not always to be found in school or in great laboratories. Sometimes
what we learn depends upon our own powers of insight.